Christie's December Old Masters evening made £12.7 million on King Street, led by Gerrit Dou's The Flute Player at £3.8 million.
Gerrit Dou’s The Flute Player led Christie’s Old Masters evening at King Street on Tuesday 2 December 2025, a sale that made £12.7 million.
Dou, born in Leiden in 1613, was Rembrandt’s first pupil and went on to lead the Leiden fijnschilders, the fine painters known for small, polished panels. The Flute Player sold for £3.8 million against an estimate of £2 million to £3 million, the highest price among the evening’s lots. It was the only guaranteed lot.
Christie’s has held its London sales at King Street since 1823. The December evening followed the July Old Masters sale at King Street, which made £55.2 million, and offered 31 lots after two were withdrawn. Sixty-seven per cent of the lots offered sold, and eleven of them exceeded their high estimates. Domenico Beccafumi’s Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and Saint Catherine of Siena was bought in.
Richard Parkes Bonington, who died in 1828 aged 25, painted a marine that sold for £889,000 against an estimate of £400,000 to £600,000. The French court painter and playwright Charles-Antoine Coypel made £482,600 against an estimate of £250,000 to £350,000. The landscape painter William Hodges, who worked in India in the early 1780s, sold a group of musicians playing the sarangi, tambura and tablas for nearly five times its low estimate.